Sytse Frederick Willem Koolhoven

Koolhoven 1920

Sytse Frederick Willem Koolhoven , called "Frits" , (born January 11, 1886 , Bloemendaal , † July 1, 1946 in Haarlem ) was a Dutch racing car driver , aircraft designer and entrepreneur.

Frederick Koolhoven was born as the son of Abraham Koolhoven, who made a name for himself in 1883 as a co-founder of the ANWB traffic and tourism club . Abraham Koolhoven later became director of the Mittelrheinische Kohlensäurewerke in Oberlahnstein , Germany, which operated a facility for liquefying carbon dioxide there .

Koolhoven's path to becoming an aircraft designer

At the age of 18, Koolhoven left his parents' house and went to Belgium, where he found a job as a car mechanic at Minerva , for which he later also took part in car races. In 1907 he was part of the Minerva racing team that took first three places in the Ardennes race for Kaiserpreis vehicles. Koolhoven finished second behind John Moore-Brabazon and in front of Kenelm Lee Guinness in this 600 km race through the Ardennes . The statement that he later opened a Minerva agency in the Netherlands is not certain.

After the first contact with the very delicate aircraft at the time, Koolhoven is said not to have been particularly taken with them. He decided to come up with better designs, but wanted to get a pilot's license beforehand and then deal with aircraft technology.

So he quit Minerva and went to France to attend the Hanriot brothers' flight school. He received his flight license on November 8, 1910.

Back in the Netherlands in 1911 he found a job with Maatschappij voor Luchtvaart (Luftfahrtgesellschaft), a company that at the time mainly organized air events and air races . In the same year Koolhoven designed his first aircraft, called the "Heidevogel", an improved copy of a Farman biplane .

After the economic end for Maatschappij voor Luchtvaart at the end of 1911, Koolhoven went to France again to work for the Deperdussin company in the team of the then very well-known chief developer Louis Béchereau .

Already in the summer of 1912 Koolhoven was promoted to operations manager of the British offshoot of Deperdussin, the British Deperdussin Company Ltd., combined with his move to England, where he was also involved in the development of the Deperdussin Seagull .

When the gates of Deperdussin had to be closed forever, Koolhoven switched to Sir WG Armstrong Whitworth and Co. , and with the beginning of the First World War the great days of Frederick Koolhoven had come. He developed several aircraft for Armstrong Whitworth, recognizable by his initials FK in the type designations.

His first success was the Armstrong Whitworth FK3 , a reconnaissance aircraft, even more successful was the Armstrong Whitworth FK8 , of which about 1700 copies were involved in the aerial warfare over Europe and in the Middle and Far East.

In 1917, Koolhoven accepted an offer from the competition and became chief designer at the British Aerial Transport Company Ltd. (BAT).

A British Aerial Transport FK23 Bantam, developed by Koolhoven

His fourth design in this company, the BAT FK23 Bantam , was considered to be extremely successful, but due to the end of the war it came too late to demonstrate its capabilities in combat.

After the war, Koolhoven constructed the BAT FK26 , a machine that was planned from the start as a commercial passenger plane - thus the first real passenger plane in the world.

The company BAT did not survive the crisis in aircraft construction that emerged after the war, and so Koolhoven went back to his home country due to a lack of job offers in England.

There was only one aircraft manufacturer there, the Fokker company , but Koolhoven did not want to work under the owner Anthony Fokker . So he initially took a job at the company Nederlandsche Automobiel en Vendunguigfabriek Trompenburg (formerly Spyker ), a company in the automotive and aircraft industry, and worked there in the automotive sector.

Two years later, a second aircraft company was founded in the Netherlands, NV Nationale Vendunguig Industrie , in which Frederick Koolhoven immediately found a job as a designer. His first design was the FK 31, a two-seater reconnaissance aircraft and fighter, which received great attention at the Paris Aero Salon in 1922.

Your own company

Although Koolhoven delivered other good designs for NV, they were not a commercial success, so that this employer also had to close its doors.

And so, in 1926, Koolhoven decided to start his own company at Waalhaven Airport near Rotterdam .

First of all, civilian samples were produced in Koolhoven's factory, mainly training planes and small passenger planes. The first successful model from the Koolhoven company was the Koolhoven FK41 , of which only 6 copies were produced in-house, but which was very successful as a licensed replica at the Desoutter Aircraft Company in England. Originally it was planned to manufacture 250 copies of the small aircraft nicknamed the wedding aircraft in Rotterdam. The machines were designed for one pilot and two passengers.

The most successful Koolhoven model was the Koolhoven FK51 , a military training aircraft , 161 of which were delivered to the Dutch Air Force and to Spain.

Frederick Koolhoven was able to expand regularly over the next few years and in 1938 had around 1200 employees in his company.

The end

When the German invasion of the Netherlands began in May 1940, the Koolhoven company came to an end; The first target of the German Air Force bombers was the Dutch airfields, and so Koolhoven's factory in Waalhaven was razed to the ground within a few minutes.

Although the Koolhoven company initially continued to exist after the death of its founder after a stroke, and several attempts were made to re-enter the aircraft market, apart from the construction of two gliders, no other projects were known.

So the company ended in 1956 through liquidation.

Kooloven's estate

A foundation has been set up in the Netherlands, the Stichting Koolhoven Vfluguigen , which deals with the person Frederick Koolhoven and his constructions and makes the information collected available to the public via its website, among other things.

Web links

Commons : Sytse Frederick Willem Koolhoven  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Website of the Stichting Koolhoven Vflyuigen (in English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 1907 Grands Prix. (No longer available online.) Www.teamdan.com, archived from the original on December 14, 2018 ; accessed on February 18, 2020 (English). 
2. ↑ The aerial trolley is coming , Rheinsberger Zeitung , April 24, 1929.